Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/74

 he will go on with, and when the watch is completed that, too, will be his own.

He is then taught to make other fine tools, and to finish the frame, ready to receive the wheels.

Then he will leave the first room, and pass up into one where he is taught to fit the stem-winding parts, and to do other fine cutting and filing by hand, to make watches that will strike the hour, minute, etc., for which class of work the Swiss are so famous. One can readily conceive how exceedingly minute and exact such workmanship must be, particularly on the minute snail—that is, the guide which permits and arrests the striking, so that, in addition to the hour and the quarter, the very minute shall be sounded.

The master in this room had been thirty-eight years in that office, directing, inspecting, criticising, and it was interesting to



observe that his eyesight was still perfect, a fact which tends to confirm the statement sometimes made that it is rare to find a working jeweler an inmate of an eye infirmary.

When the student has mastered the work on these fine file-dressed parts, he is ready to pass on into the train room—i. e., the room in which the wheels are cut. Here he will be taught how to handle the beautiful little machines which cut the cogs. Some of them are so fine that they can be adjusted to cut twenty-four hundred cogs on one small wheel.

In this room are to be seen large working models of watch movements, perfect watches in every respect though large as a saucer, which enable the student to study very important matters of the angles of cogs, the bearing and adjustment of the matched parts, etc. Many of the numerous jewelry shops over the city have these mammoth watch movements running in the windows as a means of engaging the attention of the passer-by of mechanical tastes.

The next step upward is into the escapement room, where those steel parts that constitute the escapement—the scape-wheel, lever, and balance—are cut (see Figs. 4, 5, 6).